A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
